Perpetuation

Every morning, I take my daughter to the french school and make my way back home. This take an hour and a half on a good day. When I get back home, I'll have a coffee and cigarette, do the washing up, check my email and look at The daily nice. Then, around 10 am, I start assessing what needs doing and what it is that I actually feel like doing. Around that time invariably, an anecdote from my past creep to mind, triggered off by an object, a name, an image, a thought. If I have a lot to do, there is no time to dwell on it, but if, like today, I ignore the obligations of the day, I am in for a roller-coaster ride of events and encounters that have led me here. It is not always healthy. It is always written in books that one should not dwell on the past; seize the day, they say...well, when the day consist of very little else than grime and chaos, the exploration of lost worlds and civilizations always seems like a good idea. 

I wanted to tell about my first commission, because the way it came about was pretty much how all dream jobs happen and its foreseen consequence was that once you start living the dream, there is no stopping you until you wake up and there is no dreams left to dream unless you start building an other life. So, here it goes:

I had something like 20 prints, portraits of friends essentially assembled as a portfolio that wanted to look like one of those of the top fashion photographers I was meeting in the studio where I had worked as an assistant and had just been sacked from for using the company's car to go to a rave and "loosing" it. A friend  suggested I show my pictures to the graphic design team of a new music magazine called Magic. I went along. Somebody called me 3 weeks later and said could I start working for the magazine. There would be a portrait to do the next day, at the Source Lab offices, the artist name was DJ Krush. "Sure" I said trying to sound professional. I put the phone down and howled and wailed and jumped and just felt the rush of joy going through my vein; DJ Krush was one of my musical hero at that exact time, his second album Strictly Turntablized was playing on loop at home.The following day, I had half an hour to do my thing, in the lovely parisian courtyard of Source Lab which was the distributer for Mo'Wax record. May be because everyone there was so cool, the shoot went well, I liked the result. I think I was dripping with sweat when I processed the 2 or 3 rolls that night. Later on I shot a few portraits for Magic until, while living in London, I screwed up somehow on a shoot of Cocteau Twins and I never heard from them again(I did bump in to Robyn Guthrie once...a fine gentleman he is). Mo'Wax was the latest hip label to come out of London at the time, producing along with the Bristol based Massive Attack, the best of what would be known as Trip Hop music. I still like DJ Krush, I will always admire the guy, I'm very faithful like that. After that, I could never differentiate pleasure from work, which was handy because in London, you never got payed as a music photographer. I went to show my portraits to the art director at Mo'Wax when I moved to London, we became very good friends and he gave me all the Mo'Wax promos. Then the dream started fading...